Partially Revoke Manual Action

First post on here and was wondering if anyone could answer a question I have.

Recently my website was hit with a penalty due to "inorganic" links.

We removed a great deal of these links, amended anchor text when we had been participating in guest blog posts, however this morning we received the following from The Search Quality Team:

"Hello Michael,

Thank you for your request.

After re-evaluating your site’s backlinks we are able to partially
revoke a manual action. There are still inorganic links pointing to
your site that we have taken action on. Once you’ve been able to make
further progress in getting these links removed, please reply to this
email with the details of your clean-up effort."

Can anyone shed any light on what this means? None of our search terms have improved yet.

That usually means that the team has been able to remove a part of the manual actions being taken due to the changes that you've made. It sounds like there still are some issues that you might want to review & resolve though. Generally speaking, it can take a bit of time for these kinds of changes to bubble up, and to be visible in search results, it would be rare to see a jump right afterwards. My recommendation (not knowing the specific case/site) would be to follow the advice of the search quality team and to continue working on removing any unnatural links that your site may have collected over time.

Is this still related to the same stuff we've been trying to remove, or has Google found new links?

That probably isn't answerable (from Google anyway) since it would require Google knowing what you knew (in advance of) the before & the after of the first notification; neither of which Google would have any factual understanding of.

To clarify a little more... if you added links today and you saw your ranks increase the very next day... would that increase be associated with the links you just added the day before or the devaluation that 8 domains which use to rank above you got?

If you didn't know the 8 domains that use to rank above you got devalued you wouldn't assume that was the cause (no matter if it was or was not).

Google cannot possibly predict which links are tied to which notifications unless you (at least) fill in the specifics.

e.g. "Google we used this link scheme over here... did you nail us for that the first time around".

ANSWER MIGHT BE: "No, in fact we didn't notice those at all so thanks for pointing them out."

This exercise isn't about just getting rid of the links Google detected but all links that violate TOS... if you take care of the latter batch number does not matter.

We are in the same boat. We got the same letter, and have worked hard to clean up things that were of concern to google.. and then got the same email you did about the penalty being partially revoked. I love to be able to know that was revoked and exactly what is pending so we can address it. It is like shooting in the dark without details.

I will share this: blog roll links are the worst. We cleaned them up and saw a big difference. We also know that over-optimized anchor text is now a SEO sin. We worked on it also. I don't have data to share, but things are getting better.

Kind of a same problem occurred to one of my sites as well. We got a message in Google Webmaster Tools on 13th May12 mentioning that Google has artificial or unnatural links pointing to our site. Even though we were never engaged in any of the spam linking activities, we still remove some of the spammy or we can say irrelevant links. Then we filed a re-consideration request on 24th May12. Since then, we have not received any reply from the Google Webmaster Team. Now since 6th Jun12, the traffic and rankings are sinking constantly. I'm sure their wasn't any algorithm changes on 6th as Panda 3.7 was rolled on 8th June. Can anyone please provide their opinion on this.

Basically, with all the algo changes, and from my own personal user experience of Google, they've really messed up anyway. It's turning out to be a total dogs dinner.

So I use Bing now. They allow websites to remove "dodgy" links (well they don't tell you what the links are but you've got the opportunity to remove some stuff) and a good friend of mine works for a well known SEO company and his jobs recently been applying negative SEO tactics to his clients competitors.

I run a website called www.homeopathyheals.me.uk and I have it on Googlewebmaster Tools, etc.On Sunday 30th the site dropped from page 4 (for the single word 'homeopathy') on Google down to page 17 !! It hasn't been below page 6 since at least 2010. It is a site almost entirely devoted to homeopathy.

In the UK there is alot of trouble from skeptics who can call on thousands of each other to deliberately click up their negative websites on homeopathy. Most of them are science students and computer nerds, so there may be other bad tactics they use.

I would like Google to check to see whether they have somehow pointed spammy links to my site or done something like this to bring it down. All my links are to top homeopathy sites, alot of which are reciprocal with them. Otherwise there are some natural health weblinks as well.

But I have gone by the book where Google SEO is concerned.

Can you PLEASE tell me why my website has dropped after being quite high for so long?